Waste and health in New York¶
by Daisy Lewis
What is the connection between landfill proximity and respiratory health in New York?¶
I’m currently working on a project to reduce construction waste in New York City. I was inspired by a number of articles I came across when doing research for this project that talk about the correlation between landfills and respiratory disease/asthma due to the harmful pollutants produced by landfills and the emissions from the transportation of waste. A big question I’ve been asked is why is waste a problem? It may seem pretty obvious that it is unsafe to live by landfills, but they are still being operated and are built near communities, so it is still an equity and environmental issue. Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to try and prove myself that they are indeed harmful in the area that I am focusing on.
Methodology¶
Since this is really difficult to prove at the city scale because of how small the datasets would be, I will be performing a linear regression analysis to see if there is a relationship between landfills and respiratory health issues in the state of New York. I will be comparing at the county level, because again there is not enough waste data at the city level.
I performed a linear regression comparing the number of landfills per capita with the asthma rates in each county.
Asthma Hospitalizations in New York¶
The first data source I analyzed was asthma hospitalizations since 2012. This data was obtained from the state of New York’s open data portal (health.data.ny.gov). This map utilizes the County Health Assessment Indicators that were developed in 2012 and represent over 300 health indicators. Each county is represented in this choropleth map showing the rate of asthma hospitalizations per 10,000 people.
Waste Management Locations¶
I next plotted the location of landfills and waste transfer stations in the state of new york. I gathered this data from New York’s open data portal again and plotted it in jupyter. One thing to note is the data online said these were “landfills” but in the data table included many points that were waste transfer stations as well. As you can see, there is a clustering of waste management locations around the Bronx. Understandably, there are more people in these areas, but this still made me wonder if there was a connection between these two phenomena.
Key Findings¶
I used matplotlib and statsmodels to perform a linear regression analysis. As you can see, this plot definitely does not show much correlation, After cleaning up the data, I used the number of hospitalizations and the number of landfills within each county as variables in this model. R squared was calculated to be 0.108 meaning that Only 10% of the data fit the regression model. This shows that (unlike the conclusion that was drawn with the articles I came across in my research) with the available data sources, there is not really any direct correlation between these variables. This is not at all saying that it is safe to live near landfills (especially since I would need more data), but someone reading this quickly or wanting to believe that could easily make that argument. Overall, I think this shows that there is not always sufficient data to prove points that may seem obvious to some. It shows how easy it is to prove or produce any type of result with any data.
Why is respiratory health so much worse in the Bronx?¶
I wanted to take a deeper dive to look at why respiratory health is so much worse in the Bronx compared to the rest of New York, particularily upstate New York. I first looked at other health problems, and then I looked at air quality.
Adult Obesity Rate in New York¶
As can be seen below,the Bronx is on the higher end of the adult obesity rate compared to the rest of the counties in New York, while this does not say much, coupled with asthma and the multitude of other health problems, the Bronx is one of the most unhealthy counties in New York.
Air Quality in New York¶
Of course, I wanted to compare air quality in New York. The air quality in the Bronx is one of the worst in the entire state, largely due to the number of people and the traffic. Tying this back to waste, the waste transfer stations located in the counties surrounding the Bronx contribute to the poor air quality and poor respiratory health due to the traffic from the trucks transporting the waste.
Density (square miles)¶
One reason for these discrepancies could be the sheer fact that the Bronx and the counties that make up New York City and its suburbs is incredibly dense. The chart below looks ridiculous, but it is used to highlight the fact that these counties have so many more people per square mile that the reason for more asthma hospitalizations could also be due to the fact that there are just more people in general. With more people, there is likely to be more travel, more industry, and more emissions that contribute to the poor air quality.
In conclusion...¶
While these data and this analysis likely did not prove anything or state anything new, I hope that this site and analysis and raise some awareness in the world of environmental justice. Our waste is never local. What is produced in one place is processed in another, and this entire process affects people in places that did not contribute to its production. The Bronx is a place that needs more attention and needs to support its residents in creating a safe and healthy place to live.
References and Data Sources¶
data.ny.gov https://abcnews.go.com/Health/poverty-pollution-neglect-bronx-coronavirus-formula-disaster/story?id=70084738&msclkid=a1561ca4cfcb11ec9fd5388df125c1e1 https://www3.epa.gov/aircompare/ https://www.cccarto.com/fipscodes/newyork/?msclkid=6bde4de4cffd11ec9109ff565abb9201 U.S. Census U.S. EPA